Category Archives: Camping

Fire played a large part in my early life, and I was never far from one. Sometimes my experiences with fire were frightening, as I have mentioned in the previous parts of this story, and sometimes they were humorous. In Part III I am going to describe three instances in which fire was exactly what fire should be, and that is simply warm. These stories were times when fire warmed the soul as much as the body, so much so that the glow of those fires continues to burn low even today.

The first story took place at Silver Strand, a beach on the narrow strip of land that connects the town of Imperial Beach, on the Mexican/U.S. border, with Coronado Island. I have no idea why my father preferred to take us to Silver Strand, which was much farther away from our home than were the more popular Ocean, Mission and Pacific Beaches. Perhaps it was the ubiquitous Navy presence in that South Bay area that drew my very Navy dad to choose that spot. Ultimately it didn’t matter much. He was driving and Silver Strand was his preferred beach. Sand and water and waves were the only things necessary to me, and I spent many a wonderful, sunny San Diego day at Silver Strand.

One of the things that I liked most about the Strand is that it had concrete fire rings. These circular pits were about four feet in diameter if my memory serves me correctly, and were raised about eight or ten inches above the surface of the sand. The logic behind those rings was that if people’s beach fires were contained within visible and enclosed areas there would be fewer people stepping onto a smoldering beach fire left covered only by a thin layer of sand. This happened often at other beaches and could result in painfully burned feet. I never had the dubious pleasure of stepping in any such unintended booby trap, but I can’t believe that it was anything like a pleasant experience.

As I have written before, starting the fires was always my job. On our visits to the beach I did so as speedily as possible so that I could get into the water as soon as possible. My brother Fred, who had no such pyrotechnic contract with our father, was always in the water first, and so I poured my heart into plying Prometheus’ gift in order to join Fred as quickly as I could. Once the fire was securely established I would turn it over to Dad and fly straight as an arrow into the waves.

At this point it is necessary to explain something about the water off the beaches of San Diego, and also about my juvenile physique, and how the two came together to shape this story. Although San Diego has a warm, mediterranean climate, with palm trees and stucco houses hidden behind hedges of hibiscus and bougainvillea, the water flowing south past those beaches did not originate anywhere near the Mediterranean Sea. The North Pacific Gyre draws water from the chilly northern reaches of that ocean and then impels them past the Washington and Oregon and Northern Californian beaches, until they finally arrive off the coast of San Diego.

In addition to the continuous flow of chilly northern Pacific water past our beaches, a phenomenon called the Ekman Spiral conspires with the Coriolis Effect to draw the warmer surface waters westward. This, in turn, causes colder deep waters to well up from their abyssal depths to replace the surface layer, ensuring that nobody without a wetsuit of some kind will spend extended periods of time in the water without getting thoroughly chilled.

Now add to that picture my physical stature at that time. To say that I was thinly built is like saying that Kim Jong Un has a really bad haircut. I ate very little when I was young, and that fact was demonstrated by my spindly frame. Compared to my childhood form, Richard Scarry’s Busytown character Lowly Worm looked like the Incredible Hulk, all of which is to say that I had very little spare tissue to protect me from the usually cold water of Silver Strand.

I would persist, however, and stay in the water, getting the stuffing knocked out of me by waves and generally having a ball. When I could no longer stand the cold I would emerge, blue and with teeth chattering, and return to our picnic site next to the blazing fire. Mom threw a blanked around my shivering shoulders while Dad would scoop a trench in sand that had been warmed by the sun. I would then forsake fire and blanket to lie down in the trench. Pop would cover me with the warm sand and I would lie there like a corn dog, warming up from without and within.

Fred would usually come in about this time because my retreat from the water to my sand bed would normally signal the beginning of our meal. Hot dogs were skewered on long steel forks that Dad must have fabricated in the metal shop at the Navy base. They were then held over the glowing coals of our fire and quickly cooked. Bell Brand potato chips and ears of corn and cold sodas and beer were brought out to make the feast complete. Then, my body heated by sand, sun and fire, and my belly filled with all of the goodies mentioned above, and my ears ringing with Mom’s admonitions against going out too soon lest I get the cramps, or fall to rip tides, stingrays, Godzilla, and a hundred other threats and terrors that the deep had to throw against a ten year old boy (Mom was a bit of a pessimist), Fred and I would race down the beach and plunge into the frigid water, eager to do the whole thing over again.

My second remembrance of this trilogy took place somewhere around 1964 or 65 at Highland and Landis Recreation Center in East San Diego. The Rec Leader, Mrs. Shumway, had decided to stage a week long summer camp for the younger children of our neighborhood. She devised a plan to use the older teenage kids who made “The Park” their hangout as her assistants. Those with intimate knowledge of what a gaggle of misfits most of that group was would have declared Mrs. Shumway to be out of her mind to even consider it. Events proved instead that she was a genius. But that’s another story.

For one week us teenagers arrived, helping with paper constructions or officiating games and the myriad other duties necessary to keep a hoard of young children busy and happy for several hours each day. At the end of that week the parents, children, and helpers were to be treated to a feast. A business run by Pacific Islanders was contracted to come in and cook a pig in a pit.

I had never heard of anything like this before, and I had serious doubts that any such thing could be done. On the evening before the feast however, a bunch of really big guys showed up and dug a pit right where we would high jump. The next morning they were there early with a pig; yes, a real, whole, dead pig, wrapped in banana leaves.

I don’t recall all of the details of the process. Perhaps a fire was made, the pig laid on the coals and then covered with dirt and a second fire lit over it. Maybe some other means was used to cook the now-interred pig. I couldn’t tell you. I was leery of the whole deal though. I mean, bacon and chops and ham came out of plastic wrappers that Mom bought at the commissary on the Navy base. I didn’t eat dead things buried in a burning pit where, by all that was right, we should be high-jumping.

The funny thing is that my attraction to fire overrode my antipathy to buried and burning pigs, and as the time approached to remove the pig from the pit I was sucked into the excitement which everyone else was feeling about the event. In short order the pig was produced and, in spite of everything that my offended sense of propriety told me about this abomination, the meat which the cooks began to slice off and serve looked and smelled irresistibly good.

At last, with the pig looking accusingly at me through sockets from which the eyes had melted out, I accepted a plate of the pork and soon sat with Terry and Dennis and Eugene and Mack and Emilio and a dozen other boys and girls and ate a meal that tourists now pay hundreds of dollars to enjoy when they visit Hawai’i.

My final tale involving fire took place primarily at Green Valley Falls campground in the Laguna Mountains. I loved camping there as much as I loved anything else when I was growing up in San Diego, and on this occasion Dad took my friend Mike and I for a weekend in the great outdoors.

One of the things that I enjoyed most about camping at Green Valley Falls was the weekend campfires that the rangers would organize for interested campers. A fire pit was constructed in a safe area and logs were placed in a concentric semicircle, providing seating for the campers. In the evening, as daylight faded into dusk, the fire was lit and a large, cheerful blaze hissed and popped while the ranger gave a talk on the fauna or flora or geology or other related topics concerning the natural history of that corner of southern California.

During this particular trip Mike and I discovered, to our delight, that the campsite adjacent to our own housed a family which consisted of a father, a mother, a young boy, and Clarice and Marcia. I never knew the names of the father or the mother or the boy while we were camping. All of my attention was on Clarice and Marcia.

The girls were roughly our age. Marcia was the younger and they both seemed to be as interested in the two boys next door as those boys were interested in them. We spent as much of the days together as we could, and on Saturday evening we managed to sit close to each other during the rangers’ campfire discussion. I confess that I learned little that evening about the Black-headed Grosbeak, the incense cedar, and rocks such as the Julian Schist.

As we walked back to our camps after the ranger’s presentation, Mr. and Mrs. Madsen – that was their last name – allowed their girls to walk home with Mike and I, with my father trailing at a respectable distance. We sat on an outcrop of boulders that separated our campsites and talked about anything and everything until the girls’ parents called them into their camp to prepare for the night’s sleep.

Sleep is something that I didn’t do much of that night. I was very shy as a youth, and although I knew and counted as friends many girls from my neighborhood and from school, I had never before experienced a spontaneous and mutual attraction such as this, and it left my head spinning with possibilities.

But there was one complication; they lived in Norwalk, which is somewhere around one hundred miles north of San Diego. Still, true love conquers all, so the next day as we were all packing to go to our respective homes, I procured Clarise’s address and promised to write, a promise that I fulfilled with great excitement and hope.

To my chagrin however, Clarice’s family was in the process of moving. Now, instead of one hundred miles north, they were going to be more than five hundred miles away. True love might conquer all, but my puppy love was crushed by this development. I groaned at my bad luck and then turned my mind to resuming my normal activities of hanging out with my friends in the neighborhood, but now without even the semblance of a girlfriend.

As a postscript, I visited with the Madsens a few years later. My Army basic training took place less than two hundred miles from Petaluma, where they now lived. When I was able to secure a weekend pass I bought a bus ticket to that town, and upon arrival found their phone number and gave them a call.

I was treated very royally by that family, although Clarice and Marcia had their own lives and friends and were not overly excited about my visit. I have concluded that my welcome was more likely the result of Mr. Madsen’s experiences during World War II and his understanding of where I would be going and what I would be doing in the very near future.

This concludes my reminiscences of fire in my life as a youth. More stories abound, heaven knows, and I could write for a year and not exhaust them all. I hope that you have enjoyed reading them, and I hope that you will take the opportunity to (safely) light a nice fire and create some new memories of your own. These have come to be among the fondest that I have.

The sun had barely reached it’s zenith when Chad decided that it was time to return to civilization. A tube tent had been his bedroom for the last three days;, a simple wire grate with its ends set on two flat stones over a fire his kitchen, and a nearby stand of bushes his bathroom. Chad’s food supplies rested in his backpack, which hung from a tree limb by a thin nylon rope; hardly more than a string. The elevation of the backpack offered protection from bears, and the thin rope protection from the squirrels that could clamber up and down a rope of thicker caliber.

It was in all ways a comfortable camp and it had given Chad a place to unwind after an academic year of pre-med studies. Chemistry, microbiology, pharmacology and a half dozen other courses that ended with ‘ology’ had filled his time and tested his intellectual capabilities for the past nine months. The last few days had allowed him to replace those subjects with hiking, fishing, beginning to read “War and Peace” at last, and sleeping soundly in the tube tent with his head extended outside so that he could watch the stars put on their light show every night.

The camp’s comfort quickly vanished however when Chad, returning from a mountain creek where he had been fishing, discerned from afar two figures lounging in the middle of it. He had been trying, without success, to fool some unsuspecting trout into thinking that the concoction of threads and ribbons and feathers which hid the hook that was attached to his line would make a good breakfast. Chad hadn’t cared too much if the trout would bite or not, but in the event that it did, fresh trout would have been a welcome break from eating the freeze dried eggs and oatmeal with dried fruit which now would once again constitute his breakfast. The fish were uncooperative, and as the sun rose and the best feeding times for the fish passed, Chad decided that it was his own feeding time. He broke down the thin, segmented backpacking pole, replaced his lure in the fly case in his pocket, and began to walk back to his camp.

He was a good fifty yards from the camp when he saw the two men sitting there. Some primal instinct warned Chad to not go any further. He ducked quickly and quietly behind a cluster of boulders and watched as the two men sat on a fallen log at the edge of he camp. The two men talked but Chad could not hear what was being said. The way that the two men made themselves at home in his camp conveyed the sense that they considered it their own. Chad’s aversion to going down into his camp grew with every second that he watched the two men.

One of the men was a burly brute, with shaggy black hair and a large beard. He wore jeans and a plaid shirt that could barely conceal the size of his upper body. His companion was a wiry character with short hair, tan pants, a Tee shirt and a down vest. This second man had a nervous habit of jerking his head first one way, and then the other, swiveling like a monkey’s head, as if looking for approaching enemies up here at 7,500 feet

Chad stayed motionless behind the boulders, straining to hear any of their conversation that might carry in the still, thin air, and trying to convince himself that he was just being paranoid. To the contrary, the sensation of peril increased and Chad became convinced that nothing good would happen if he arose and entered his desecrated camp. He now reached down and patted his pocket, where the key to his Yamaha 250 cc off-road bike rested. A moment of panic swept Chad as he felt pocket knife and fly case but no key, but when he dug his hand into the pocket the reassuring form of the key was felt.

Chad had parked his bike in a copse of trees well away from his camp. He liked to ride far up into the remote areas of the mountains to establish his camps without the time consuming need of hiking in. He could then begin to enjoy camping with all of its activities, or lack of activities, for the greatest amount of time at the greatest distance from civilization. Once he had made camp however, Chad did not want to see the bike, as it represented the civilization that he wanted to get away from. “Yeah, it’s contradictory” he had thought, “but it’s the way I like it.” Now he was glad that he did it that way. “I hope that they didn’t see the tracks in the dust” Chad muttered to himself as he worked his way almost silently to where he had stashed the bike.

Chad heaved a big sigh of relief when he arrived at the spot where he had parked his bike and found it untouched. After a quick look around to make sure that neither of the two men was close by Chad mounted the bike, inserted the key, pushed the starter button and was rolling downhill towards the train before the roar of the motor could begin to echo off of the surrounding bare rock peaks.

Chad’s heart was pounding as he hit the trail and pointed the bike downhill, towards civilization which lay many miles distant. He looked in the rear view mirror, expecting to see the men running after him. There was nobody in the mirror however, and with a sigh of relief Chad raised his eyes up, just in time to grab ahold of the brakes and swerve, barely missing the woman who was standing in the trail, right in front of him. The bike nearly went off the trail and Chad nearly went off the bike. They both came to a stop upright and the woman came running up to him.

“Please mister, get me out of here. Oh, please, don’t leave me here alone” she said. There was a quiver in her voice and tears ran down through the dirt on her face. The thought that she might be with the two men flickered through Chad’s mind but he quickly discarded it. The tears, the voice, the torn blouse and pants askew, and particularly her shoeless feet in the rough terrain convinced Chad that this girl was in trouble.

“OK. Climb on the back” he said. The girl quickly straddled the back of the bike’s seat and locked her arms around his waist. Chad fired up the bike once again and they began to roll, this time at a more measured rate of speed, down the trail.

“What are you doing out here without shoes?” Chad asked over his shoulder, but the roar of the motorcycle’s engine combined with the wind whistling past their heads must have made it hard for her to hear, for she didn’t answer him. She kept her grip around Chad’s waist and her head buried against his shoulders at the base of his neck. After a few more tries at conversation Chad gave up and focused on getting hem both out of the forest.

After they had passed over several miles of trail, and were not very far from the parking lot at the National Forest campground that was the trailhead, Chad became aware of the girl tapping him on the shoulder. He looked over his right shoulder and saw her arm extended, index finger pointing to a small trail – barely a path, really – leading to the right off of the main trail. Chad was tempted to say “Aw, hell no. I’m not going up there,” but by some impulse that he could never later explain he agreed, and turned off of the trail and up the path.

They didn’t go far. Not two hundred yards up the path a small clearing in the trees opened up on the left. There was a small pond at the far edge of this clearing and a two foot or so boulder resting in the middle. “Stop here, please” the girl shouted in his ear. Chad pulled over and brought the bike to a stop. He did not, however, turn off the ignition. The girl dismounted quickly and walked over to the rock, upon which she sat down.

Chad extended the bike’s kick stand and followed the girl. She was seated on the rock, and as he approached he asked “Do you live around here?”

“Live around here?’ The girl repeated his question in a dreamy voice. “No, I don’t live around here. I don’t live – – around here.”

“Then what are we doing here” Chad asked.

“I am looking for Cindy. I know that she is close to us. We are camping a little further up the road, but I know that she is here.”

“Camped? You have a camp up there? Well come on. I’ll take you up there. Cindy is probably up there. We should get you both out of the forest. It’s not safe here today”

“No, Cindy is here.” the girl said in a soft, dull voice once again.

Chad looked around and saw nobody, nor sign that anybody had been anywhere near there for quite a while. “Look miss, I think you need some help. Let’s go down the trail the rest of the way. The rangers there can help you to find Cindy and get you some medical attention. I want to help you, and maybe help Cindy too. I think we’ve both had enough craziness out here for one day, and I want to get to the rangers and report those two goons who took over my camp back up the mountain and go home.”

“Two goons?” the woman said, her voice rising slightly and her already pale face blanching further under the tear-streaked dirt on her forehead and cheeks. “Oh, two men! I must go. Please, I must go.”

“OK. I’ll get the bike and come back for you” Chad said as he turned and trotted back to where the bike stood on its stand, idling. Upon arrival Chad straddled the seat, gave it some gas and put the bike into gear. He came about and looked towards the rock in the middle of the clearing, but to his amazement there was nobody there. The boulder lay in its place in the middle of the glade but there was nobody to be seen there or anywhere else.

“Miss!” Chad yelled. There was no reply. He turned off the bike motor and yelled again, “Miss!”

There was nothing but silence in response to his call. He could hear the rustle of the leaves in the soft breeze that was blowing down off of the mountaintops and the gurgle of the stream which fed the pond across the clearing, but as he listened he also noticed the absence of any sound that might have been produce by any living creature other than the brush and trees. There were no chirps of wren or squawk of bluejay, no hum of fly or bee. The place was silent, and that silence was so profound that it raised the hair on the back of Chad’s neck and caused the sweat to once again begin to bead on his forehead and neck.

“To hell with this” Chad growled as fear once again rose up from his chest and settled in his throat. He twisted the handle to pour on the gas, and the rear tire sent a rooster tail of dirt and grass flying into the air behind him as he sped across the clearing, down the path and finally onto the trail that led him to civilization, now only a mile or two away.

Chad finally pulled into the parking lot at the trailhead and rolled over to the ranger station which stood beside it. He rolled his bike to the station, shut off the engine, mounted the steps and crossed a wooden porch to where a customer service window was open. The ranger behind the window smiled and said “How can I help you?”

Chad told him about the girl, saying that he feared she was in trouble. The ranger listened in silence, and when Chad was finished he called for a second ranger to come over to the window with him. “He’s seen Julia” he said as the second ranger approached.

“Julia?” Chad asked. “You know her name?”

“Probably” the second ranger answered. “Torn blouse? Pants messed up? Dirty face? Wanting help getting out of the forest?”

“Yeah” Chad said. “What the hell is this? What kind of freak show is going on here?” Chad was beginning to feel anger replace the fear and confusion that had filled his day so far. Was this some sort of monstrous joke that the locals enjoyed playing on visitors?

“Julia was a girl who went camping in those mountains with a friend two years back. They were gone longer than they said that they would be, and when we went in to look for them we found her body about five miles up the trail, raped and strangled. She’s been appearing to people ever since.”

An icy shiver crawled down Chad’s spine as he digested what had just been told to him. “You’re shitting me, right?” he asked.

“Nope” the ranger replied. “I wouldn’t tell you such a wild-ass story if it wasn’t true. We aren’t up here to monkey with the customers. What I’ve just said is God’s truth. I can give you a list of people who have seen the lady, and it isn’t a short one. You’re the first one who has spent that much time with her though; who’s given her a ride.”

Chad stood still in front of the window, feet rooted to the porch and jaw hanging agape. At last he regained his voice.

“So you’re telling me that I rode down that mountain with a ghost on my bike? That’s bull shit. She was as solid as you and me. I felt her arms holding onto me and her head on my back. I know when a person is riding on a bike with me. She talked – a little anyway – and she pointed to where she wanted to go up a path. Then she made me stop and said her friend was there, but I didn’t see anybody. Then, when I turned my back she disappeared. But she was friggin solid man. She was friggin real!”

As Chad told this story the rangers’ interest picked up considerably. At length one said “She guided you somewhere?”

“Yes” Chad replied. “She took me to a clearing and said that her friend Cindy was there. But there was nobody there. And since I had split from my camp earlier because two sketchy-looking dudes had moved in on me while I was fishing – oh, I forgot to tell you all about that shit. Two rough looking characters came into my camp while I was fishing and I really, and I mean really, didn’t like their look, so I left my gear and started down the trail. Right then’s when I almost ran into the girl.”

The two rangers looked at each other for a moment, and then back at Chad. At last one of them said “Would you be so kind as to come inside for a moment?” while the other was reaching for the telephone on the desk.

Six months later Chad was reading about the trial. He had taken investigators to the clearing, where they had found the body of a murdered woman beside the stone that his rider had sat on. The body turned out to be that of Cindy, the other camper. Along with the body, forensic evidence was found that tied the murder to Robert and Leroy Paige, brothers who’d had minor brushes with the law and spent much of their time in a cabin a few miles away from the clearing where the murdered girl was found. These two were the same men who had invaded Chad’s camp on that memorable day.

At length the two confessed to the crimes. They explained that they raped and killed Cindy and buried her on the spot, and then took Julia further up the trail and repeated their crimes. They were nearly seen by approaching hunters however and didn’t have time to bury Julia. They expressed no remorse for their acts and were sentenced to life in prison. Leroy committed suicide shortly after he arrived at one big, cold maximum security prison, and Robert sits snugly in another, never to see the free light of day again.

As to the girl? She’s not been seen by anybody since the body of her friend was found and her killers were put away. Chad decided that there was no point in returning to his camp to recover the gear that he had left. It had probably been stolen, he reasoned, and even if it had not been it would be in poor repair by the time he could get back to it. The truth however is that you couldn’t have lured Chad back up that trail for all of the money in the world

One of the great failed experiments of my life was a brief stent that I did with the Boy Scouts of America. I have loved camping and the outdoors for as long as I can remember and the attraction to an organization that represented pup tents and hiking and sleeping bags was irresistible, so in due time I and several of my friends contacted the Boy Scouts. After a short while Mr. Saysack made contact with us and our parents and we were placed together, along with several guys from the margins of our neighborhood, into something called a “pack” or “troop” or “patrol” or something like that. While I don’t really remember what they called our little group I can clearly remember that we were number 926.

The goal of the Scouts is to turn out boys who become good citizens and the Boy Scout Oath says it all: “On my honor I will do my best to do my duty to God and my country and to obey the Scout Law; To help other people at all times; To keep myself physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight.” The Scout Law mentioned above states “A Scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful and thrifty.” If I was to cudgel my brains for a week I don’t believe that I could come up with a group of kids less likely to succeed in this endeavor.

The core of our group were myself and my friends Wes Miller, Brian Nosanko, Butch Martin and Larry Gerrow. I don’t know what Butch’s real name was, but I suppose that it could have been Butch. I knew Butch through my friendship with Wes, and can’t say that I ever really liked him very much, if at all. Butch lived with a single parent and used the freedom that that condition gave him to run completely wild. Butch knew nothing about truth, honor, kindness or anything else of that nature. I lived in a very authoritarian family situation and the utterly unencumbered freedom that Butch enjoyed seemed appealing to me, but any amount of time spent in his presence led me to believe that he was not a person whom I would ever call a friend. In later years Wes, who stuck with Butch into early adulthood, came to call him “The Worm”. It was an accurate name. I have no idea what happened to Butch after we were all about 22 or 23 but I am certain that it wasn’t good.

Brian was more fun to be around, but he had his issues as did all of us. Brian’s issue was that he was an enormous liar. Now all of us would tell a fib every now and then in order to get out of trouble, impress a girl or something like that, but Brian would tell whoppers that were breathtaking in scope simply for the pleasure of telling them. Most of Brian’s corpus of work I have forgotten, but his dad’s rubber blowtorch and his ability to take the head off of a wasp with a BB gun, or maybe it was a bow and arrow, stood out from amongst the throng. One time Wes and I tried to count all of Brian’s lies and, with a little enhancing of our own, arrived at the number of 1,000. Brian, who we called “Fantastiko” in a modification of his real last name, was outraged by this activity. “It’s not more than 700” he declared. I’m not making this up! Brian was last seen wandering burned out, befuddled and homeless on a beach in San Diego many years ago. I doubt that he is alive today.

Larry was just a normal guy, for our neighborhood anyway. He had an edge about him and would not hesitate to fight over issues that I could not see the worth of, but he also had a good heart and was a lot of fun to be around. We spent a lot of time just hanging out, daydreaming and competing with each other to tell the biggest lies about our significance, frequently with an eye towards impressing Susan Smith, who was not nearly as impressed with either one of us as we were with ourselves. Larry moved out of our neighborhood in my early teens and I lost track of him. I was told that he walked into a liquor store that was in the process of being robbed and was shot and killed, and I assume that this story is true.

If you have read any of my other stories you know about Wes. He was also from a single parent family and was a handful for his mother, but Wes had a better grip on life than did Butch. Wes always did have a sense of order and of right and wrong, and in the end turned out very well indeed. We still write to each other to this day.

So we became part of the group numbered 926, and Mr. Saysack began immediately to try to mold us into something like Boy Scouts (a fool’s errand if ever there was one). None of us were any good at tying knots with ropes, starting fires with a bow, or any of that other merit badge stuff. In fact, I am not aware of any of us even earning a single merit badge. For my part I lacked the self confidence necessary to even conceive of so doing, and the other guys just didn’t care one way or the other about it all. What we mostly wanted out of the Scouts was the hiking and camping, and hike and camp is what we certainly did.

Our experiences were pretty much what you would expect them to be. We cooked simple meals over campfires, with the scoutmaster doing the more complicated duties and us ineffectually trying to clean up. We pitched our tents and gathered wood, climbed trees and descended from lower branches by climbing down ropes, and best of all, we hiked.

I loved the hiking and often engaged in that activity with my father. He taught me to take water in a canteen, wear a hat to keep the sun off of my skin which refused to tan, and most important of all, find and carry a longish stick to use as a walking stick and also as a snake finder. The mountains and deserts east of San Diego are full of snakes, some of which have a diamond pattern on their backs and a big rattle on their tails, and father taught me early about the wisdom of letting them know of my presence well before I put my shoe down in the midst of their coils. Rattling my stick in the brush as I walked would alert the snakes to my presence and they in return would rattle their tails to alert me to theirs.

On one particular hike I was more interested in goofing off with my friends than paying attention to details like those mentioned above and we found ourselves running single file down a narrow path through the low chaparral in the hills east of the city. The scoutmaster and his assistant had told us to stay together as a group but of course we blew that instruction off as quickly as we could. I don’t remember just why we were running down that path but running we were, and I most vividly remember what happened next.

I heart Butch scream a short distance ahead of me, followed by a shouted curse word by Larry and then the same from Brian. Wes and I had time to pull up and then we crept forward to see what was happening. A couple of yards in front of us we saw a small widening in the path with a huge rattlesnake coiled on the edge of it. It seems that the guys burst into that clearing running at full tilt as the snake was crawling across the path. Snakes, as you undoubtedly know already, cannot strike unless they are coiled, and this snake was surprised by the appearance of three idiots who flew noisily over his head before he could coil for action.

He was most certainly coiled appropriately when I pulled up at the edge of the clearing and was sending an unmistakable message that any further interference with him was going to be paid for in the most painful of ways. The three boys on the other side of the clearing were howling for the scoutmaster and Wes and I ran back up the path to find him.

Mr. Saysack came back with us and calmly assessed the situation. Picking up a large rock he advanced to as close to the snake as he safely could and threw the rock down upon the snake’s head. He repeated that process with another rock and then, holding the snake’s head down with a stick just in case it was only playing possum, extracted his Boy Scout knife from its sheath and cut off the snake’s head. We dug a hole in the dirt and buried the head several inches deep, since one can step on the head of a dead snake and still receive an injection of venom through its sharp teeth.

Mr Saysack then skinned the snake and ordered two of the other boys to make a campfire. We all carried with us our collapsable mess kits which included a frying pan that could also be used as a deep plate, and Mr. Saysack proceeded to use several of these pans to fry up chunks of that snake, using its own fat as oil. Most of the guys indulged but I resisted eating any of that snake. They said that it tasted like chicken. No surprise there.

On another campout we were joined by several other groups of Scouts where we enjoyed joint adventures and some competition. I recall one boy from another group trying to get a swimming merit badge by entering a standard swimming pool, swimming the length of it, and exiting the deep end, all without making a sound. This is an impressive enough accomplishment in it’s own right, but in this boy’s case it was made all the more so by the fact that he got nailed on the shoulder by a drowning honey bee while making his exit. None of us noticed this until he was declared successful, at which time he hopped around that pool like a jumping bean. The stinger was extracted and a poultice of shredded potato was applied, and the boy’s status grew by leaps and bounds even among our own group.

Later in this trip we engaged in a match of “capture the flag” with another group of Scouts. I knew that I was no way close to being fast enough to dash up a low hill and capture the other team’s flag before they could catch me, so I hatched a plan to crawl through the tall grasses on my belly like a reptile and catch them by surprise. I moved out to the right edge of the field which stood between our two flags and began to execute my plan silently and invisibly.

I don’t know how long it took for me to use what the Army would later teach me was a “low crawl” to cross that field and begin to approach that low hill where their flag fluttered in the breeze at the summit, but I would say at least a half hour and probably more. I had crawled through thistles and the occasional cactus, with bees and wasps fluttering around my head and anthills everywhere to be avoided, but finally I was at the base of that hill, well rested and ready to explode out of hiding, race up that hill to where the flag was, and carry it past tired defenders to the accolades of my fellow Scouts.

It was at that moment that Tim Jensen, one of the members of our group from the margin of the neighborhood, popped into view from the other side of the hill, snatched up the enemy flag and ran whooping past the boys of each group. Tim was a pudgy kid who had less athletic ability than even I did, so I cannot adequately express how greatly it vexed me that he used some stratagem similar to my own to earn the cheers of our side. I arose from my hiding place and took my time coming in, dragging my feet and pouting all the way.

We didn’t exist as a group for long. Mr. Saysack grew tired of wasting his energy trying to make Scouts out of us, and we were just hitting the years where girls and cars and music and smoking and everything else was successfully competing for our attention. My parents separated then and now I lived in a single parent family too, with predictable results.

Rumor has it that the Boy Scouts retired our number, not wanting to take the chance that anything like us would ever come around again. I don’t know if that is true, and in fact it probably is not. But we really were not what Robert Baden-Powell had in mind when he started the movement over 100 years ago. Still we had fun, and while we were Scouting, however poorly we accomplished that endeavor, we were not doing anything worse, and for that I guess the Boy Scouts of America deserves a round of applause and a tip of the hat.

I don’t believe that anything tastes better than something cooked in the great outdoors or indoors over wood. There is some sort of magic that can be found when a wood fire applies heat to a pot, pan or skillet preferably, but not exclusively , in the setting of the great outdoors. The items being cooked are almost irrelevant. When the meal is set and ready to be consumed it is one of the most heavenly sensations one can imagine. In fact, I believe that meals in heaven will be cooked on wood burning stoves in cabins in some celestial woods, but that’s just my opinion.

I began my romance with outdoor cooking when I was a very small boy. When my father was not somewhere in the world on a Navy ship we would frequently pack up our 1950 Studebaker and drive to a campground in the Cuyamaca Rancho State Park in the mountains east of San Diego. We would leave early in the morning, usually well before the sun would come up, and drive about an hour and a half to the favorite family spot. Many times we were able to get our very favorite camping space; number 36, I think it was.

Time of year was of no consequence. My brother Brad and I loved running wild in the rocks and fields and canyons and brush-covered hillsides during the summer, but we equally loved the frozen, ice and snow covered winter landscape as well. In fact, winter was my favorite as far as food went for a couple of reasons.

First, I loved to make the fire that my mother would use to cook over. I was a little pyromaniac anyway, and loved to burn pine needles and dried weeds and junk lumber that my father always seemed to restock in our back yard. Dad taught me how big a fire ought to be and where it should be placed, and then let me burn all that I wanted. This scared the crap out of our neurotic neighbor, who once called the fire department on me when I was sitting in front of a small fire one afternoon. I heard the sirens and thought to myself “Man, that’s close.” Then I heard the “clump clump clump” of heavy boots on our concrete driveway. Then, what looked to my twelve year old eyes to be a small army of firemen poured through the gap between our house and garage into the back yard.

“Where’s the fire?” they demanded. “This is the only one that I know about” I said, pointing to my little camp-style fire. The firemen looked at each other with a look that I didn’t recognize then, but as I think back on it I now know all too well that it said “We’ve been punked”. But there they were. They were firemen, and I did have a fire going. So they pulled their big hose with the heavy bronze nozzle into my back yard and blew the hell out of my fire. I was completely dumbfounded by the whole thing, but my mother put two and two together quickly enough. I really liked the Mr. who lived next door, but I never had much time for the Mrs. after that.

Anyway, I liked to start fires, so my father would give me one match when we went to the campground and it was my duty to get the fire going so that Mom could get the breakfast started. During the summer that was a small challenge at best. In winter however, the pressure was definitely on. Mom would cook on the big steel and stone camp stoves built by the CCC workers during the Great Depression, and in winter they might be covered three or four inches deep with snow and ice. Dad would give me wood, a hatchet, a knife, and one paper match and tell me to get the job done.

Challenge accepted! I would chop away as much ice and snow as I could in order to clear the grill and release the steel door which folded down to give me access to the roughly twelve inch wide by ten inch high by two or three feet deep firebox, where I was tasked with producing a cooking fire thick with glowing hot coals that Mom would use to create a king’s feast. Using the knife I whittled shavings in increasingly larger size until I had a pile of them. Next I produced small sticks, again of increasing size, until I had a pile of graded pieces of wood at the foot of the stove. I carefully arranged my shavings and small sticks in the firebox without the assistance of any paper as a fire starter. Only wimps used paper to start a fire!

Finally all was prepared and I would strike the one precious match on an emory surface and it would flare with its ignition. I was patient, allowing that initial flare to settle down into an even flame before I advanced the match into the shavings. Smoke would curl up through the pile of shavings and chips, and then a tiny flame would be established in the filamentous fuel.

At this point I would drop the match and begin to tend my small and fragile fire. Bit would be added to bit, slightly larger as the fire gained a foothold in my pile of tinder, and in short order I knew that the fire would be a success. Sticks were added, and then bigger sticks, until larger chunks of wood were added to make a roaring fire before which numb hands could be warmed, coffee could be brewed, and finally a full breakfast of eggs and bacon, potatoes and ham and grits and whatever one could possibly want could be created by the culinary genius that was my mother.

A glorious outdoor breakfast did not have to be a complicated affair however. One of my favorite meals ever consumed at that campground was as simple as a meal could possibly be. When I was very young I tried to win prizes by selling Christmas cards to my neighbors. A company somewhere produced a catalogue of prizes that could be earned by selling certain amounts of cards, and I signed up and set out to push those little-more-than-average cards on as many neighbors as I could con into buying them.

By hook and by crook I peddled one full shipment of those cards and was given several choices of what prize I could acquire from the catalogue. I chose a collapsable camp oven. This thing would fold until it was nearly flat, but when unfolded it formed a metal cube that could be set over a camp fire or a Coleman stove and could be used just like a real oven. It even had a thermometer on the front that told you the temperature within.

So one early morning my father took me and my best friend Wes to do some fishing on the stream which ran through the campground where we always preferred to go. The state people stocked trout in that stream and I caught one every now and then, but not on this day. After freezing our little butts off for an hour or so we returned to the campsite and Dad fired up the Coleman stove. We were going to have pork and beans for breakfast but Dad had forgotten to bring a can opener, so there we were with a big can of pork and beans and no way to get at them.

My father was nothing if not resourceful. He knew right away that the beans were a lost cause. We had canned biscuits however, and so the oven was assembled and the biscuits opened up, lined up in a greased pan, and placed in the oven. In no time at all the biscuits were withdrawn from the oven and placed on top of that cube in all of their golden brown glory. Dad then squeezed honey out of a bottle onto the top of the uncooperative bean can and we took turns sopping up honey with our warm biscuits and slamming them down the old hatch.

I believe that our breakfast of biscuits and honey a-la bean can was as good as any meal that I have ever eaten. I can close my eyes and go right back to that picnic site under the oak trees just off of the parking lot at Green Valley Falls and taste the honeyed sweetness of the soft, warm biscuits that we ate that morning. My father was a Jekyll and Hyde sort of character; sometimes I hated and feared him and sometimes I loved him. I loved him that morning. I wish that I could tell him that I love him again. Perhaps I will sometime.

I will conclude this topic with one more tale of a wood cooked meal, but this one was not cooked out of doors. One Thanksgiving or Christmas, I’m not sure which one it was, in the year 1974 or 75, again I’m not sure which one, my wife at the time and I drove north from Sonoma County California to Eugene Oregon to share the holiday meal with her friends from high school. Clarice stayed in touch with her friend Kaye and Kaye’s fiance Carl, and we were invited to do the meal with them that year.

Kaye and Carl lived in a huge victorian house with three or four other couples. It was a sort of urban commune; a thing rather popular in those days. Kaye was going to college at the University of Oregon and Carl was a hippy, occasionally working at replanting hillsides where loggers had clear-cut the forest, frequently playing a guitar rather badly, and always ready to roll and share a joint with anybody who was ready to party. When you are the son of a doctor, life can be easy like that.

Clarice and I left our apartment early in the morning and drove straight through to eugene. I was raised by me father to drive like an automaton when great distances needed to be covered, so we would have stopped to get gas and pee and buy me another quart of beer and that was about all, so by the time that we arrived at the big victorian house we were both pretty well tied in knots. We walked the wet and grey streets of Eugene with our friends for a while and then, after a meal of something-or-other and a goodly amount of alcohol and marijuana we turned in for the night.

We slept in quite late the next morning, and when we finally did crawl out of bed the activity in the kitchen was already hot and heavy. Bert, one of the other residents of the house, was in charge of the stove while his wife Evelyn was in charge of what got cooked on/in the stove. Evie was cooking a turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes and gravy, yams, rolls, and an assortment of other items on a huge iron wood burning stove in the kitchen. Breakfast was long past so Clarice and I ate some sandwiches and snacks that we still had in our cooler while we waited for the main event.

Only slightly less impressive than the meal was the process by which it was cooked. At one point “Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” came on the television and we all got appropriately psychedelic to watch it by. While Willie Wonka was sailing chocolate rivers and Charlie Bucket and Grandpa Jo were floating dangerously close to the huge ventilator fans, saved from being sliced and diced only by releasing their lighter-than-air gas load by frequent belches, we were all drifting between Mars and the asteroid belt, sharing joints and mushrooms and feeling very much a part of the movie.

But every so often some sort of alarm would go off in Bert’s psychedelicized brain and he would arise and go stuff a measured amount of wood into the fire chamber on the side of the oven which housed the turkey that we would soon be devouring. It was truly uncanny, the way that Bert just knew when another load of wood was needed. Too much wood and the oven temperatures would spike, and too little would result in the temperature falling below the proper cooking level. A nice, constant temperature is what was needed, and that temperature was provided by one of the most impressive of stoned slackers that I have even had the privilege to meet.

At last the movie reached its stirring conclusion with Willy and Charlie and Grandpa flying over the city in some sort of cross between an elevator and a telephone booth (younger readers will at least know what an elevator is), and the dinner bell was rung. Bert and Evie first brought out the turkey, followed by all of the other awesome delicacies that they had cooked and kept warm on shelves over or adjacent to the stove.

Bert carved the bird and we all ate until just before we got sick. I have to say that it was one of the finest meals I have ever eaten, and even though it was not cooked outside, well, it has to be among the most special of meals because of the 19th century wood stove manner of it’s cooking. As long as God grants me the blessing of memory, I will never forget those wonderful meals that I have described in this story. Heaven, for me, will almost certainly contain meals such as these.

There were many camping trips in which I engaged following my release from the Army. I have already written of one of those trips; the trip to Minaret Lake with my oldest friend Wes. That trip came early in my new civilian life and was among the best of my life. One year later Wes and I decided to hike out of Yosemite, up the north wall of that amazing canyon and onto the more or less level high ground which our hiking guide book said that we would find up there. We attacked the trail in mid-morning but by noon we seemed to be nowhere near reaching the top of that twisting, tortured, switch-backed trail. Wes and I decided that life is too short to waste on such energetic endeavors, so we returned to the valley floor.

Resting in the shade by my car, Wes and I scanned the book in search of another place to camp. We didn’t want to stay in the valley with the million-plus other tourists and vacationers, but we didn’t want to drive somewhere else either. Wes noticed that there was a trail which extended up the east end of the canyon, beyond the general tourist area, where it began to climb up into the Sierra Nevada mountains. That path followed the Merced River to the string of falls and small lakes that could be found up there. That path appeared to be a road commonly taken and we were interested in a road less travelled. Looking at our map we noticed that if we veered north from where the shuttle bus ended it’s route into the eastern end of the canyon, around the misnamed pond of Mirror Lake, there began a sort of path which followed a creek the name of which I forget which flowed out of a smaller canyon which climbed back up into the mountains too..

This was no formal trail, but others had been this way and a sort of path could be seen among the rocks and trees which lined the creek. I don’t know how long we walked; it didn’t seem like a very long time but these things become cloudy when a person is disconnected from their clock and enjoying nature. It couldn’t have been more than an hour or two because we reached a good place to camp with a good deal of the day left before us. Our camp was by a pool at the base of a ten or fifteen foot waterfall, beneath a tree which had dropped a thick bed of leaves over the years, which gave us a soft place to pitch our tents.

This spot was enchanting. The falls was beautiful and the valley secluded. Few other hikers came by that day or the next. Water birds called ‘dippers’, or ‘water ouzels’, would fly into the creek and walk along the bottom eating insect larvae, tadpoles or small fish if they could find them. We marveled at those birds. The only negatives to this campsite were the squirrels which quickly gnawed through Wes’ pack to get at the food items within before he could hang the pack by a rope from a tree limb, and the white noise from the waterfall.

The white noise was an interesting phenomenon. I paid little attention to it during the daytime but at night, after we had sipped a bit of our backpacking staple of cheap bourbon whiskey, and smoked a joint or two, the strangest sounds could be heard emanating from the noise made by the constant splash of water falling ten to fifteen feet into a pool. As I lay in my tent I could hear everything from people talking to ten speed bicycles clicking to police sirens, and all of this several miles from any possible police sirens or ten speed bikes.Like everything else in life one gets used to it, but it did detract from a good night’s sleep. Wes and I hung around that camp another day fishing (with better luck than we experienced at Minaret Lake), reading and relaxing, and then returned to my car and from there to San Diego.

That was not my last foray into that part of Yosemite however. One year later my best traveling partner, Joe Medina, and I were driving around Northern California visiting friends and camping out here and there and I mentioned the place where Wes and I had camped earlier. That sounded good to Joe and so we pointed his Volkswagon bus towards Yosemite National Park. We parked the bus near the visitor’s center and stocked up on food at the little store that is maintained there. A short shuttle ride later we were standing in front of Mirror Lake and ready to walk eastward into the wild canyon at the rear of the park.

The trail was a little busier than it had been when Wes and I had camped there the year before, but it was still very quiet as we walked further from the tourist area. We reached the waterfall where Wes and I had pitched our tents before but the day was still young, so we decided to push on. Climbing the steep bank over which the creek was falling was not too difficult a project and upon reaching the small plateau which gradually narrowed and rose as one walked further east we recognized instantly a perfect campsite. Two logs lay perfectly situated on the ground to provide seats in front of a fire. We brought stones together to make a fire pit in front of those logs and pitched our tents on the soft soil nearby. The bank over which the creek fell was just enough of a barrier to traffic that only a few hardy hikers passed by our camp, and they mostly just waved and walked on.

Our area seemed to have hardly been camped in at all and so there was no shortage of dry firewood littering the floor of the forest. We had small gas stoves to cook on, but a fire in the morning to brew coffee over and a fire at night before going to bed is something which makes a camp a camp. We were as comfortable as could be, and even being twenty two year olds and restless as that breed tends to be, we were very content to explore around our camp a little but mostly sit on those logs and talk about things that I couldn’t possibly remember today and probably wouldn’t interest me now anyway. They were interesting and speaking was effortless then however, and we spent the rest of that day and most of the next doing just that.

There were however three occurrences which added a little spice to the trip. Early the next morning I was forced out of my tent by the need to take care of some urgent business. Even in such an idyllic setting of nature one still must answer when nature calls. Taking the toilet paper and a collapsable shovel I looked around until I found a small log lying on the ground which looked as if it would serve for latrine duty. I dropped my drawers and positioned myself comfortably on the log, and proceeded to add another log to the forest floor. About midway through this process I heard a ‘snap’, and my attention went into high alert.

My first thought was that Joe might be sneaking up on me with his camera. We were young males and that kind of humor was (and remains) common to that set. My second thought was a bit more dire. Bears frequent the vicinity of Yosemite, usually on the valley floor where there are trash cans, picnic baskets and coolers to pillage in search of the crap that we humans usually like to eat. But the bears have to come from somewhere, and eventually return there when the garbage is gone, so I wondered if I had chosen to take my ease on some sort of bear highway.

That is a thought that will pinch things off in a hurry but I knew that it would be foolish to move an inch, so I just sat there bare to the world, waiting to see if a bear would come along to ruin my day. In a minute or two I heard soft rustlings in the leafy carpet of the forest floor and a large brown shape loomed from behind a boulder. “This is it”, I thought, “Smokey’s revenge”. The shape did not have the rounded bulk of a bear however, and as my panicked vision cleared I could see that my visitor was a deer. I don’t remember if there were antlers, so I couldn’t say if it was a buck or a doe. All I cared about was the fact that it didn’t have claws and teeth and a very bad attitude. The deer and I stood and sat motionless for a moment, staring into each other’s eyes at very close range. Slowly the deer ambled off towards the remote east end of the canyon. I quickly finished the business at hand and returned to the safety of our camp where Joe and his camera were still snuggled comfortably in his tent.

Later that morning a couple of parties of hikers came past our camp. The first was a middle aged man and woman who simply waved and walked on. That is usually how I liked it when I camped in the wilderness; I didn’t go to the woods to hang out with people. The second party was different though. Two guys, roughly our age, with German flags sewn onto their backpacks. This told us clearly that these were two guys who would bring interesting stories into our camp.

Pius and Rene were indeed from Germany; from Munich, or “Muenchen” to be exact, and with the customary German fondness for precision they insisted on being exact. We offered them coffee and rolled a couple of joints, and within an hour’s time we were fast friends. Pius and Rene were students traveling abroad during the summer, and this was a time in America when more people would still hitchhike from coast to coast with little fear. It was far from a perfect time, but two white guys with short hair and no beards had a good chance of traveling in America by the seat of their pants in relative safety. We spent a couple of hours with our two new friends, learning about them and their home as they learned about us and ours. The time came for Pius and Rene to move on, and we exchanged addresses. Oddly enough we were visited by Pius and Rene later that month at the house I shared with three other friends. I have not made it to Germany yet to repay that visit.

My last outstanding remembrance of that camping trip came later in the afternoon. It was a warm day but not uncomfortably so, and there was a nice breeze blowing which cooled things down to a very acceptable level. I had a can of deviled ham and some crackers and prepared to enjoy them while sitting on the bank over which flowed the creek into the falls. From that vantage point the view was stunning. Not a single evidence of human activity could be seen from that spot, and the whole of the Yosemite Valley opened up before me. The sheer walls of naked rock stood in their frozen permanence while the carpet of tree tops in the valley below swayed and rippled like tall grass in the wind.

Like every other stoned slacker of my age in those days I had read Carlos Castaneda’s books about a Yaqui sorcerer in Mexico with whom he allegedly spent time doing a research project. The first of the books which emerged from this project was entitled “A Separate Reality”. Many are doubtful of the academic seriousness of his books or even the existence of the focus of those books, Don Juan. Nevertheless those books were read voraciously by those of us who were comfortable living in our own separate realities, and I sat there trying to see the entire valley as a living, breathing organism. That effort failed miserably but the beauty of the simple, three dimensional here-and-now valley was deeply impressed into my memory. I finally picked my stoned self up and retreated to our camp, where our campfire coffee and reconstituted freeze dried food and another snort or two of whiskey completed our evening.

We broke camp the next morning and retraced our path to Mirror Lake in time to catch the shuttle to the visitor center and have a late breakfast there. We left Yosemite to continue our rounds of visiting friends in the north and I have never returned to Yosemite since. In a way I don’t have to. The diving birds, the waterfall, the deer, the breathtaking views of the valley, Pius and Rene; all remain in my mind as if it was yesterday instead of forty years ago. Part of the pleasure of retelling this story lies in the fact that I get to relive it That is a blessing indeed.

Wes and I recovered quickly from our arduous climb to Minaret Lake, and after a short while of sitting under the lone tree that was close to our camp we decided to get busy. We were both hungry so we lit a fire in the rock fire pit that we had built. The nearby stream seemed to contain clean snowmelt off of the white stuff which crowned the nearby peaks and so we scooped up a couple of pans full with which to cook up some of our freeze dried dinners. It was probably beef stroganoff for me, and as I recall the finished product did roughly resemble beef stroganoff. I certainly remember that it tasted wonderful, but then sitting in paradise at 9.800 feet eating food cooked over an open fire, I could have eaten the sole of one of my K-Mart boots and liked it just as much.

Wes suggested that we explore the valley in which we were camped and so after cleaning up our mess we began to poke around the area. One of the first things that we noticed was that even at 9.800 feet mosquitos lived near water. And they were big suckers, too. While not as numerous as I’ve seen elsewhere, these guys were on steroids. As we walked along the lake shore the little vampires rose up and attacked like kamakazis. They would bite anywhere, including through denim jeans. I had completely failed to take mosquitos into account and was therefore defenseless. Wes had a small amount of a commercial insect repellant in his kit but it was nearly gone. I could see that Wes’ repellant wouldn’t last long even if he was the only one using it, and it didn’t seem right that he should suffer more because I neglected a pretty basic tenet of camping. I declined his offer to share and continued slapping at the little monsters, leaving bloody splotches on my arms, face, and jeans.

At one point we jumped over a small stream and mounted one of the rounded rocks near where the trail rose up out of the valley below. Lying on the ground on the other side of the boulder was the remains of a camp which did not appear to be more than a week old. We could see where the tent pegs had been driven into the ground, where the campfire had been, and where the garbage still was. Up next to the rock were two large black plastic bags with all manner of cans and paper products and uneaten meals and, most amazing of all, empty bottles of one of the cheapest and nastiest pop wines on the market at that time.

Wes and I stood there looking at the mess with disgust and astonishment, and did not hear the sound of the horse’s hooves until the beast hove into view over the same rise that we had surmounted earlier that day. Seated atop that horse was a forest ranger who was making his rounds. I believe that the ranger saw us before we saw him because he never once gave us the impression that he connected us with that pile of trash. I’m certain that he could read the disgust on our faces as plain as day.

“Good afternoon boys. How is your day going?” he asked.

“We were doing fine until we saw this mess” was my reply. “What I want to know, beyond why somebody would leave this crap in a place like this is how they got it here at all.” When every box, can and bottle in that pile war full it would have amounted to a lot of weight.

“They probably got it here the same way that I got here. Usually a party of hikers will be met by someone with a pack horse who will bring their supplies in here. It doesn’t happen a lot and usually they clean up after themselves, but this is not the first pile of shit that we’ve had to haul off of the mountain. Someone will be back later to pack that stuff out of here.” I couldn’t help but wonder how somebody with the resources to have access to a pack horse would stoop to drinking that increadibly nasty wine, but they were clearly bottom-feeders so I left it alone.

“What kind of camp have you set up?” the ranger continued. We showed him our camp in the distance and described our equipment and plan, which was limited to exploring, relaxing, fishing, and maybe a little reading. Wes and I were both avid readers.

“The only thing bothering me is that I forgot mosquito repellant” I commented in an off-hand way. The ranger scowled and said “They’ll eat you alive.” He reached into his saddle pack and retrieved an olive drab can with a spray nozzle on the top. “This will keep the little bastards off of you” he said as he tossed the can to me. The can was classic government issue. As I wrote earlier it was olive drab, with some code of letters and numbers denoting what item number it was in some catalogue somewhere, and written across the can was INSECT REPELLANT in black letters which blended into the deep green of the can. I gladly accepted and sprayed myself down, and as I handed it back the ranger smiled and said “Keep it. I’ve got plenty.” I don’t know what was in that insect repellant but I am certain that it had a plutonium base. The mosquitos never bothered me again on that trip.

The ranger told us that someone would probably be back the next day to clean up the mess and waved goodbye. We returned the wave and continued with our exploration of the valley, which was in fact more like a shelf. We jumped over creeks, waded gingerly through marshy ground, and eventually came back to our camp. The day was creeping into evening, and shadows from the cliff behind us began to advance across the valley floor. Wes began to fiddle with his very light weight, collapsable fishing rod and other gear while I laid back against the tree with a book. We could cook dinner in the shadows of evening but it would be hard to read or do much else, and that is pretty much how we spent the rest of that day.

After cooking and cleaning up, night fell upon us like an onrushing train. Wes and I pulled out our half-pints of cheap bourbon whiskey that we had brought and drank a swallow or two before turning in. I shed my shirt and jeans and crawled into my mummy bag. Even in mid summer the nights can be pretty cool at 9,800 feet, especially with a wind blowing off of the showpack even higher up. I felt perfectly comfortable lying in my bag on a thin foam pad in my little tent. The darkness was as nearly pitch black as it could be, especially as I was cut off from the starlight in my tent, and there were almost no sounds apart from the occasional rustling of the grasses by a light wind. I lay there awake for a short while, alternately nervous in the unfamiliarity of near total dark and near total silence, and utterly relaxed in those same phenomena. I was reflecting on that duality and the next thing of which I was aware was the light of a new day penetrating the nylon of my tent.

After leaving my mummy bag and dressing quickly in the chill of the morning I emerged from my tent and immediately got a fire going. I knew that Wes wouldn’t be far behind me and coffee would be needed on an emergency basis. I took a nip of bourbon to get the blood moving and then went to get a couple of pans of water from the nearby creek. By the time I returned Wes was sitting on a rock close to the fire pulling supplies out of the pack which we had hoisted into the tree the evening before. In no time at all we had breakfast and coffee prepared and ate one of the finest meals ever cooked.

After putting our camp in order we prepared for our first adventure of the day. Behind us rose the 800 foot cliff which I previously described and at that height, nestled in a bowl created by the confluence of the cliff and the Minarets, lay Cecil Lake at 10,400 feet. The book that we brought with us said that there was a steep trail which led over the top of the ridge and sure enough, we found that trail. Steep, however, was an understatement. The climb was as close to vertical as one could get without going hand-over-hand, and near the top that’s just what we did.

The payoff, however, was worth every exertion. Cecil Lake lay cradled in its stony crib with little more than rock, ice, snow, and water making up the scene. The starkness of the environment had a severe beauty and Wes and I simply sat for a while admiring it. Broken rock had tumbled down the steep sides of this natural bowl with little growth of any kind poking up from between the jagged stones. The lake had a fifteen to twenty foot ring of ice extending from the shore towards the center of the lake, with the ice-free bulk of that center even more blue than Minaret Lake below. The picture was stunningly beautiful. Rising from our rocky perch we carefully crossed over to the other side of the bowl, disturbing marmots who somehow lived in that sterile-looking place. Climbing the bank on the other side we gained the rim to look out over a vast scape of mountain peaks, most of them at a lower altitude than we were, which stretched west across the Sierras towards Yosemite and beyond that the great central valley of California.

After taking in the view for a good long while we retraced our steps and returned to camp. We had taken a couple of hours to climb the cliff and return and we wanted to try our luck with fishing in Minaret Lake. Our gear was as simple as we could make it, but we had enough to try bait, lure, and fly. Unfortunately, none of them seemed at all tempting to the fish. We would switch baits, we would move to other spots, we pulled in our lines and then returned in the evening, and nothing worked. I suppose it’s possible that there weren’t any fish in that lake at all. I don’t see how they could have gotten there in the first place, but as I have heard elsewhere, “Life finds a way.” We finally threw in the towel and broke down our rods and stashed our gear away.

The trout dinner which we had expected had to be substituted with more of the freeze-dried food that we had packed in with us, and we were eating that at a faster rate than we expected. The exertion of the climbs on both days, the general exhilaration of being so far into mostly unspoiled nature, and the fact that we were two twenty-one year old men with serious appetites, combined to make us literally chew our way through our supplies a lot more quickly than we had intended. Taking stock, we saw that we had enough for one more day, but we would have nothing for breakfast the morning after that. Our path back may have led downhill but it was still eight miles, and neither of us relished that long of a walk on an empty stomach. In the end we decided that we would have a good breakfast the next morning and break camp. I was beginning to fear that my mosquito repellant was running low anyway (it wasn’t really. It lasted for two more camping trips).

The next morning we made up the coffee and a larger than average breakfast, and lounged in our camp until the sun was well up. Wes and I took our sweet time folding up our tents and rolling up our sleeping bags, and when we were packed and ready shouldered our packs and bid goodbye to Minaret Lake with as much melancholy as it was possible for two young men with their lives ahead of them to muster, and then we set out on the trail back to Devil’s Postpile.

My car was untouched and waiting as we trudged into the parking lot. Wes and I quickly stowed our packs in the trunk and fired that Mercury up. In very little time we were on the road, and pulled into a restaurant in Bishop ready for a real meal. I’m certain that we smelled like a garbage dump when we walked into that squat & gobble cafe but that didn’t bother us at all. If it bothered anyone else they didn’t share their displeasure with us. It was about two in the afternoon and since it was between lunch and dinner we decided to eat both. I am sure that I put five pounds of food down the hatch and Wes might have eaten more. All that remained was about nine or ten hours of driving and we would be home, clean and fed again and lying in our own comfortable beds in our own homes, with refrigerators full and the noise of the city around us, a million miles away it seemed from the pristine beauty of that jewel of the wilderness, Minaret Lake.

My love of camping was born and nurtured within my family when I was a child. Equipped with a mix of commercial, military surplus and homemade gear we would set up camp mostly at a public campground in the Laguna Mountains east of San Diego. We came to know every inch of that campground as if it was our own back yard, and even with that familiarity we still loved every hike, every dip in the river, every slide on the wet rocks by the falls, every day and every night that we spent there.

When I graduated from high school in 1966 my President had plans concerning my immediate future, and within two months of my graduation I was a soldier in the U.S. Army and doing more camping out than I liked. In California, in Texas, and in Vietnam I enjoyed multiple opportunities to live close to nature, all the while dreaming of getting back into nature without a drill instructor or a first sergeant yelling in my face or an enemy soldier shooting at me. That opportunity arrived in late 1969 after I had finished my tour of duty and was discharged from the Army, a free man once again.

Shortly after my return to San Diego my oldest friend, Wes, proposed that we backpack into the Sierra Nevada Mountains to a place called Minaret Lake. Wes showed me a book which contained many hikes in that area and they all were appealing. The hike to Minaret Lake drew us to it mostly because the trailhead began at Devil’s Postpile, a busy area where it would probably be most safe to park a car for several days, and because the eight mile walk with a gain of over two thousand feet of elevation made us confident that we would encounter nobody who wasn’t out there for the same reason that we were.

Preparations began for our trip, and for me they began at zero. I had almost no backpacking gear and what little I did have was left over from a short and unsuccessful experience with the boy scouts. We were all a bunch of misfits in my neighborhood and did not comport well with the boy scout mold at all. With some of the money with which the Army sent me on my way I purchased a lightweight backpack, an Army surplus mummy bag for sleeping, a one man tent and other accoutrement. We planned to spend five days at our camp, and so freeze dried and other dry and instant food products would also have to be carried in. When we were ready my pack didn’t feel very much lighter than a full pack in the Army did.

I arose early and drove to Wes’ house, where we added his gear to mine and began the day long drive to Devil’s Postpile. Our route took us east of Los Angeles and out across the Mojave Desert. I have always loved the desert and this was a very enjoyable part of the trip for me. Speeding on northward we entered the Owens Valley, a dry valley now that most of its water has been siphoned off to supply that precious resource to Los Angeles and environs. The locals are still quite irritated about that. We drove through Lone Pine and Bishop, where we stopped to get a meal and a few other last-minute items, and then finished our drive in the parking lot at the Postpile. We parked close to the ranger station, hoping for more security for my car.

We slept in the car that evening; the big bench seats front and back that were common in cars of that vintage made pretty good beds, even for a couple of six-footers who had to fold themselves up a little in order to fit. At first light the next morning we crawled off of our car seats, walked around a bit to work the kinks out of our cramped muscles, secured our packs onto our backs and set out on the trail which led to Minaret Lake.

The trail was mostly broad and easy to follow, and Wes and I chatted as we walked along through the conifers. It was easy to talk even though we started at about 7,500 feet above sea level, as we were young and in pretty good physical shape. The gain in elevation for the whole trip was about 2,300 feet but the grade was easy at first. Soon however we broke out of the thick conifer forest and began to pass through more sparse growth. At one point, as we neared a broad valley where the creek which we were paralleling broadened out into a marshy area with no definite banks or borders, Wes and I somehow lost the trail and began following what looked like it might be a trail which led south of the valley and up a rocky and pine covered hillside. After twenty or thirty minutes of struggling up that false track we realized that we were way off course and returned to the valley floor. There we promptly regained our trail and continued across the cattail-covered valley to begin climbing again on the other side.

By this time Wes and I had ceased to talk much. The trail was beginning to climb more sharply now and although we were eating trail mix and hard candy our energy was being sapped by the grade and the altitude. All along from the beginning of the hike I had enjoyed the view of the majestic mountains, with jagged splinters of rock which jutted a thousand feet into the sky after which Minaret Lake was named, and Minaret Creek which bubbled and splashed down the mountainside nearly always within our view. As we began the final few miles towards our destination I began to focus more on simply getting up the next hill, breathing, and putting one foot in front of the other.

At length we came to the last half-mile or so of our hike, which also happened to be the most steep. We dug into that climb with determination in order to put this ordeal behind us. I remember counting cadence in my mind as I walked; one-two-three-FOUR, one-two-three-FOUR. My feet kept moving, rising and falling with my mental calling of the numbers. The effect was hypnotic and soon my feet and the count were all that existed. This went on for what seemed like an hour but in fact was much less than that, and soon the trail began to flatten out and I marched over the last rise to catch my first glimpse of the breathtaking jewel that is Minaret Lake.

The lake lies in an upland valley at the base of a mountain range which includes several rocky spires which rise up sharply into the clear sky of the Sierras. Somebody many years ago thought that they resembled the tall, thin buildings which tower over Muslim cities and towns from which mosque officials call the faithful to prayer. I confess that I did not see that resemblance at all, but the other guy saw these mountains first so he got to name them. The lake itself is the bluest blue imaginable, taking up much of it’s valley. Grasses cover the dry portions of the valley with occasional evergreens stretching skyward, and softly rounded boulders seemed to have shouldered their way through the soil to show above ground a tiny glimpse of their true bulk, much like an iceberg shows itself in arctic waters. It is quite possibly the most beautiful place that I have ever seen.

But that is not what I thought when I first saw it. The exertion, the altitude, and perhaps a little dehydration combined to force me to sit down on the first rock I could find and try not to throw up. Wes was similarly affected, but recovered a bit more quickly than me, so he shortly went off to scout for a good campsite while I continued to convalesce. From my boulder I looked back at the terrain across which we had traversed on our assent to the lake. I could clearly see the gain in elevation that we had recently made, which made me feel better about not feeling so good as I sat on my rock in the sun.

The ground sloped steadily to the east while mountains of bald, rounded rock rose up to the north and northeast. It is said that those mountains were smoothed off by the action of glaciers during the last ice age. I suppose that is true, but I don’t know; I wasn’t there then. Regardless of how they were formed their massive solidity communicated strength and permanence, but their soft roundedness also suggested welcome, although I am certain that there was danger enough for the foolhardy in those peaks. At least, that’s what it said to me.

To the west rose up a cliff which was probably 800 feet high. This rock feature traveled from southwest to northwest and provided a back wall for the valley of the lake. the cliff was steep but not sheer, and Wes and I would soon be scaling it, but more on that later. The southern boundary of our valley was the massive body of the Minarets, into which the previously mentioned cliffs merged. The totality of this panoramic view was breathtaking and I could hardly believe that I was in this place, although the shakiness in my knees served to remind me that it was quite true.

After catching my breath and regaining some strength I rose up from my rock and shouldered my pack. I could see where Wes was pitching his tent and angled around a bay of the lake to gain that spot. A good spot it was, between the lake and a stream flowing into it, on good dry ground and close to but not under a lone tree. I pitched my tent beside Wes’ and we made a fire pit out of stones and a wire grate which we brought for that purpose. Our food was placed in a bag which we hoisted into the tree. I don’t know if bears hang out at 9,800 feet, but Wes and I had not interest in being surprised.

With the hike over and camp made we sat with our backs against the tree. Wes was facing the Minarets and I the rounded mountains to the north. We didn’t speak much at first, as we were struck with the power and beauty of the place. I can remember reflecting on how only a couple of months before this moment I was squatting under a metal roof on the tarmac of Bien Hoa Air Force Base hoping to not catch a last minute bullet or rocket before flying home after two surreal years in Vietnam. The regimented life of a soldier, the threat of death at any moment from a bullet going so fast that you don’t hear it, the alcohol and drugs that I used to self-medicate against the stress of Vietnam and the strangeness of returning home to a country which seemed to either scorn me or be embarrassed by me, and mostly preferred to pretend as if I wasn’t there at all.

All of that baggage seemed to slough off of me as I sat in the tranquil cleanness of that vast mountain landscape. The lake, the rocks, the streams, the mountains; none of them cared where I had been or what I had done. They did not care that I was there, but neither did they reject me. I was there as my own agent, as much a part of that scene as a fish in the lake or squirrel in the tree or marmot in the rocky cliff above us. I was welcome to come and take my chances like every other living thing there, with the prize being a peace that I had not felt in years or perhaps at any time in my life. I thought to myself “Not a bad way to start a trip”.